If Trump loses, it doesn’t redeem American democracy. Democracy is an information-processing machine drowning in bad information. One normal result doesn’t correct the systemic issue. If you ask your search engine for “good apple pie recipe” and the first result calls for a cup of bleach, you don’t just move on to the next result in the list with ease and confidence in the system.
Trump proved, and reproved, and reproved until it was exhausting just to keep reading about it, that he doesn’t understand his own policy positions, and doesn’t care. He knows less about US immigration law, trade deals, climate, health care, and taxes than someone who spent five minutes on wikipedia learning about any of those topics. On his signature policy achievement, the tax cut, he was asked to leave the negotiating room by members of his own party because he was sabotaging them with ignorance. He contradicts himself without any self-awareness. His own staff anonymously report that they can’t get him to read a one-page daily briefing filled with pictures and his own name highlighted. Foreign diplomats publicly report exactly the same thing, with their names attached.
Yes, on top of that, he’s got a generally cruel vindictive streak. He likes to punish brown people — whether that’s denying aid to American citizens in Puerto Rico while 4000 of them died, or the Muslim ban, or creating uncounted numbers of orphans out of legal asylum seekers at the border, after subjecting these children to what amounts to torture as they piss themselves without diapers and sleep without blankets and forget their own parents, held in another detention center (and which is not, in any factual universe, anything like the Obama Administration’s policy, but I can’t even repeat basic facts anymore without my head being crowded with the garbage propaganda that half the country consumes).
He’s not just less qualified than the average man on the street, he’s less qualified than the average man in the crackhouse, because at least the man in the crackhouse would take the job seriously enough to try to learn something about it.
This unique kind of anti-qualification comes, I suspect, from being rich all his life, never having to work for someone else, and never being denied power. He can imagine that he doesn’t need to learn because he’s never had a formative moment in his life where he had to read something to understand it or else an employer would impose a consequence on him for it. He gets $500M under the table from his father, invests it in his father’s line of work (Manhattan real estate), and decades later, those investments are the only thing his name is on of real value, while he’s bankrupted a half a dozen other ventures and remained untouchable. If he’d taken the $500M and parked it in index funds (what your average know-nothing investor goes to by default to avoid learning anything), his net worth would be higher.
The fact that this is who America elected says a lot about the future of democracy, no matter who they elect next.
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An information-processing system: You get a hundred million voters, you provide them with mass media about the candidates and the state of the country, the voters think about what that information means for them and try to contextualize it in their own lives, they show up at the polls, they pull a lever.
If the mass media voters are getting isn’t reliable, democracy ceases to function.
Throughout the 20th century, mass media was more or less controlled. There were a handful of sources with gatekeepers. People consumed it for a couple hours a day, maybe.
Today, there’s no controls on information, and people never unplug. Any asshat can start a news site with all the apparent authority of the New York Times, and if they say the NYT is lying to you, then you’re at an impasse. This has happened at massive scales, promoted by social media, abused by foreign governments (and the US has largely responded to every report about this by rolling out the red carpet — even rolling out the red carpet to keep trying to hack the voting machines).
Until we’re at the point where the density of propaganda out there on Alt Media is effectively more powerful than real media.
How could you measure this? Consider an experiment. Imagine you have a non-story in the news, any little bullshit factoid that might belong on page A-10 of the paper for a day. And you want to manipulate it to become an enormous, all-encompassing scandal. You twist the facts, make it unrecognizable from what anyone who tried to research it would find, and repeat your version all day every day to your little slice of audience, who find it reliably outrageous in your telling. And because media companies are all desperately competing to keep you glued to their site as their profit margins narrow, now some slightly-more-respectable media has to start reporting the same thing to try and keep you from cannibalizing their viewers with outrageous content. And soon you have a substantial part of the media ecosystem actually reporting this garbage, until you get some critical density of the electorate to believe it. And then you have the real, serious, responsible news outlets who have no choice, in a democracy, but to report on what 25% of the country believes, because it’s got profound electoral implications. And that snowballs and snowballs until your story is actually more talked about than every other policy issue combined by all sources in the midst of the biggest election of the country, and if that could happen, and you could measure that, it would be an incredible experimental outcome. Hard to imagine a firmer proof for “propaganda is mightier than news.”
And that’s what happened in 2016. You had a non-story about digital security and whether classified information was unwittingly made vulnerable, in a context where people all over the State Dept. are overclassifying and regularly making classified information vulnerable anyways. The story vanished as soon as it wasn’t useful. Months after the election, Donald Trump’s own kids were caught doing exactly what Hillary did with private servers, and nobody gave a damn. They tried to somehow link that to a terrorist attack that she had nothing to do with to confuse the issue, and here we are. More time was spent by all major media on the email story in 2016 than every other policy issue combined. That’s an incredibly high bar, an amazing feat.
That system is not healed if Donald Trump loses in November 2020. There is no greater restraint on mass media or propaganda. There is no restraint on foreign influence — there are not even efforts being made to keep them from hacking voting machines, because the party in power suspects that the hackers will favor them.
That is a system that is built to fuck up.
***
The US is first and worst, but not alone.
Every other major democracy faces similar pressures. Decent, respectable for-profit news is scrambling to compete with Alt Media that uses the most addictive, irresponsible methods to make vanishingly small profits from isolated clicks and five seconds spent on a page in confusion or outrage. They have no answer for it.
Yes, other countries are better insulated. They spend more on their public broadcasters, who can report what they think is true regardless of what it does for their ratings, and so these responsible broadcasters are better positioned to compete. There’s less money to be made from an idle second of eyeball, and so less financial pressure to propagandize foreign audiences in some cases. And there’s a less developed political divide to abuse and exploit to sow distrust of all major media.
But the same fundamental pressures are there for all of us.
The answers are probably simple — or else simple enough in concept with a thousand variations you could imagine — and utterly inimical to how most people think about freedom of information in the Western tradition. But here’s a sampler platter of what you might see fought over throughout the next generation:
1) Ban advertising on the news. Make people pay for subscriptions to support them. The difference in incentives between subscription and ad based makes a huge difference in media behavior. You’ll at least know that the news’ business model relies on appealing to your sober, reflective mindset when you balance your checkbook, and not your instantaneous vulnerability to clickbait.
2) Truth panels. If you can get a panel of editors from the NYT, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and Fox News to unanimously agree that a story is false or misleading, it should be suppressed in search results and automated advertising, flagged wherever it appears online, and sanctions imposed on the publisher for repeated violations. Pay them to put enough people in this role full-time, and you can make a meaningful dent in the flow.
3) Web licenses. If you want to start a website, you can apply for a license from your domain provider, who will ask you about content. If you’re pushing news, you can be put on a list to monitor, and your license is revocable for cause. The idea that every person should have insta-access to mass media to promote anything at all is not a social value I would defend, though I suspect many are conditioned to accept it.
4) Yes, we can multiply the amount we spend on public broadcasting a hundredfold. The idea that news media should be able to exist without an incentive to keep you addicted to the product is obvious. That only exists when you remove the profit incentive. The news is a public good. For a long time, news media was doing okay just because the scarcity of mass media sources gave them little monopolies, but that’s no longer the case.
I’m sure there’s other good ideas out there in this vein. We should be talking about them. We should be talking about them before it’s a foregone conclusion that democracy is built to fail, or that there’s nothing we can do to resuscitate the kind of system we grew up romanticizing.
Donald Trump may very well lose in 2020. Or he may win by the same process he won in 2016. Or a Democrat may win by abusing the system in the same ways. Whatever happens, American democracy is utterly dependent on and vulnerable to its mass media system, and we need to start trying to defend it.